Shadows in the Corn
The field stretched like a dark sea, rows marching away until the dusk lost count of where one stalk ended and another began. The corn rustled with a voice you could almost hear if you listened long enough, a susurrus that sounded suspiciously like something breathing. In that quiet, the line between memory and superstition frayed until it tore apart—revealing the thing that lived where sunlight never truly touched the earth.
The First Rustle
Kai had come to the old farm to spend the late summer with grandmother, a woman who swore by lullabies sung to the soil. On the edge of the field, the shadows pooled and thickened, pooling over the rows as if the corn itself leaned closer to tell a secret. Every night after the sun slipped away, Kai woke to a soft, damp whisper curling from between the stalks—a voice that spoke in a language of soil and ache.
“The corn remembers what you forget, child. Do not answer what it asks,” the grandmother had warned, though her eyes held a storm Kai could not quite name.
Signs of the Harvest’s Debt
Things began to change in small, almost innocent ways. The clock on the kitchen wall stopped at the moment the field grew still. Shoes left by the door would return wet with dew that no rain had dropped. The husks, when shaken, released a scent like old paper and secrets. And in the evenings, silhouettes appeared among the tassels, enough to make one doubt their own shadow.
- Whispers that travel without air, curling around ankles as if testing a boundary you did not know you crossed.
- A figure made of corn silk standing just inside the field, no face, only a hollow in the center where light refused to stay.
- The air thick with heat and a hint of copper, even on the calmest nights.
- A path that seems to rearrange itself if you tilt your head and listen too closely.
On the third night, Kai followed a whisper down a narrow lane between the tallest rows, the stalks creaking like an old floorboard under motion. The whisper turned into a name, spoken inside their own chest: “Stay.” The field pressed closer, the silhouettes converging into a single dark shape that stood where the corn tallied its harvests, waiting for a choice that would not exist in daylight.
“If you walk far enough, the shadows will tell you what you owe us,” the voice in Kai’s memory warned, a revenant echo from the soil itself.
Kai turned away, boots sinking into damp earth, and sprinted toward the edge where the fence gnawed at the night. Behind them, the field released a long sigh, as if the land itself were exhaling after a grievous confession. Dawn found the cornfield quiet again, the rows bowing in the morning light as if nothing had happened. Yet a single stalk bent toward Kai’s door that day, a shy salute from a place where the living and the buried share a breath—and where the shadows, once summoned, learn to wait for the next harvest.